Christine Waygood

Trading as The Soft Centre

"I have never seen my stuff as art work," Christine says. "I like things which are made for use. I like the way that in India, Nepal and Peru people make things to wear as beautiful as they can."

Christine trained as an industrial designer - at Birmingham Polytechnic (1970-73) and at the Scottish College of Textiles, where she took a postgraduate course in constructed textiles (1973-75) - because she wanted to create things that would be produced. She worked in industry as a weave designer. 

"But it wasn't hands-on," she says. "It was just paper design".

So she moved to Edinburgh and set up on her own, later establishing a women's training workshop which produced a range of textiles that were exported all over the world.

Towards the end of the 1970s Christine travelled across Europe to Asia - through Turkey, Afghanistan, Iran, India and Thailand to Indonesia. She spent a year in Nepal on a Voluntary Service Overseas scheme where she was designer and marketing adviser to a group of textile workers in Kathmandu.

"I followed the development of pattern and textures, changing across Europe and into Asia," she says. "I was very much influenced by Tibetan stuff where the patterns of weaving are based on simple structures - geometric shapes like squares and triangles."

When she returned to England she worked with a design co-operative in London and lectured in textile design in Eastbourne, Loughborough and at Goldsmiths College.

From 1985, when her daughter Jessie was born, until 1990 Christine was Head of Constructed Textiles at John Moores University in Liverpool. But after the birth of son Jack she returned to her workshop, creating rugs and knitwear and showing her work at  venues like Liverpool Bluecoat Gallery, Nottingham Castle Museum, Abbot Hall Gallery in Kendal and the Ruskin Gallery in Sheffield.

Christine has also worked on a series of public art commissions - from Stockport health authority for Stepping Hill hospital and for a children's reading corner in a Blackburn library, and with Partnership Art, Groundwork Trust, Arts for Health and Oldham metropolitan borough council.